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But exercise may offer more benefits than just helping us recover after stress. The American Psychological Association says that exercise may also help the brain learn to cope better with stress.

Research shows that people who are physically active have less anxiety and depression than people who are not active.

Some researchers believe physical exercise also acts as exercise for the systems in the body that cope with stress, including the cardiovascular systems and the central and sympathetic nervous systems.

These and other systems in the body jump into action when we are stressed. But how efficiently they communicate with each other when we are stressed may partly depend on how much practice they’ve had.

Some scientists believe that we can help train the sympathetic nervous system to react appropriately to stress instead of over-reacting, and to relax more quickly once the source of stress is gone.

These researchers believe that exercise can be an appropriate source of stress for this kind of training. Exercise is considered to be stress because it demands increased effort from the heart, muscles and other body systems similar to the body’s “fight-or-flight” stress reaction.

To test this idea, researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany studied a small group of students for 20 weeks leading up to their final exams.

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